American Dreams: The United States since 1945

American Dreams: The United States since 1945. By H. W. Brands. (New York: Penguin, 2010. x, 420 pp. $35.00, isbn 9784-59420-262-9.)

With barely twelve pages of endnotes to backstop a substantial text dvat dares to covet twothirds of a century, and bereft of either a bibliography or an explicit challenge to regnant interpretations, American Dreams makes no daim to advance a reexamination of recent American history. This volume therefore should not be judged on unfair terms. In it, the frighteningly prolific H. W. Brands has seized an opportunity to consolidate the mainstream scholarly and journalistic consensus that has generally formed around rhe key themes of postwar America to the present, even to the point of drawing on other surveys such as James T. Patterson's Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (1996). Presidential speeches and...